Organizations face tougher business objectives every day, e.g., decreased time-to-market, requirements for higher quality levels and reliability and reduced costs. Systems in which software is a dominant factor are becoming more and more challenging to build. They are playing an increasingly important role in society. New methods, techniques, and tools are becoming available to support development and maintenance tasks. Because systems play such an important role in our lives both economically and socially, there is pressure for the software engineering discipline to focus on quality issues. Poor quality software is no longer acceptable to society. Software failures can result in catastrophic losses. In this context the importance of the testing discipline, as one of the quality measures that can be taken, is growing rapidly. Testing has become a key activity that directly influences not only the product quality but also the ‘performance’ of the entire development and manufacturing process.
For the past decade, the software industry has invested substantial effort to improve the quality of its products. This has been a difficult job since the size and complexity of software increases rapidly while customers and users are becoming more and more demanding. At the same time, software development is becoming an outsourced activity or is co-developed with other sites. Despite encouraging results from various quality improvement approaches, the software industry is still far from zero defects. To improve product quality, the software industry has often focused on improving its development processes. A guideline that has been widely used to improve the development processes is the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI). The CMMI is often regarded as the industry standard for software process improvement. Despite the fact that testing often accounts for at least 30-40% of the total project costs, only limited attention is given to testing in the various software process improvement models such as the CMMI. As an answer, the testing community has created its own improvement models. This document describes the Test Maturity Model Integration (TMMi). The TMMi is a detailed model for test process improvement and is positioned as being complementary to the CMMI.